Moby talks about his memoir Porcelain, an incisive look at a life in music
Self-deprecating, hilarious and moving, singer-songwriter Moby’s memoir focuses on New York in the ’90s and his rise from a poor electronic musician to an international star and his momentary fall from favour
Rock memoirs rarely live up to expectations, but Moby’s Porcelain is an exception. It ranks with former Sonic Youth member Kim Gordon’s Girl in a Band and a handful of others in recent years as a particularly incisive look at not just a life in music, but at the cultural and social circumstances that helped shape it.
It is by turns self-deprecating, hilarious and moving, particularly when Moby describes the ecstatic sense of community he would find at an underground rave or how the tears came when he finished a track such as God Moving Over the Face of the Waters.
Porcelain focuses on the 1990s, a decade when Moby graduated from his punk rock days in Connecticut to become an electronic musician living barely above the poverty line in lower Manhattan in New York. He scored a major club hit in 1991 with Go, which brought Madonna and even a pre-fall-from-grace O.J. Simpson to his performances, and then fell from favour as the club scene shifted from joyous rave music to something darker.
Moby recovered in 1995 with his breakthrough album, Everything is Wrong, which blended ambient music, techno and punk into an alluring overview of his wide-ranging tastes. He nearly scuttled his career again in 1996 with the abrasive Animal Rights, a punishing rock album released just as electronic music was booming again with the Prodigy, Chemical Brothers and Fatboy Slim.
The memoir takes the reader to the doorstep of the musician’s biggest-selling album, Play, which he wrote and recorded while thinking his career was essentially over.
In an interview, Moby looks back on his New York years: